Thursday, January 31, 2013

Mass Democracy: Good or Bad?

When I say twitter decided the election, some of you may wonder what the heck I'm talking about...

This. This is what I'm talking about. Having popular opinion on your side does not make you right. Nor does it make you wrong. Debate is essential, and yet it is being minimized to catch phrases and follies of perception. This is why our founding fathers did not established a democracy. They devised a republic. See the difference?

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Special interests, not the public interest, rule the day in our nation's capital.

Big money and big media call the shots in Congress, the White House, and even the Supreme Court.

The people cast their votes once every 2, 4 or 6 years.

Big money and big media cast their votes every day.

Politicians pay lip service to the concerns of voters, while working day and night to satisfy the demands of campaign donors, lobbyists and the media.

The solution to this problem is simple: take big money out of politics and take big media off the public airwaves, where they have no right, constitutional or otherwise, to be in the first place.

Accomplishing this goal is not so simple, but it is possible, and indeed necessary if we ever hope to establish a government that truly is "of the people, by the people, for the people", instead of the current model - a government of the special interests, by the special interests, for the special interests.

I agree we've got a problem with not letting our politicians be individuals who also represent the people. Many of my closest friends believe we need to get rid of the two-party system because it's too polarized. What it is is a caricature of what a two-party system is supposed to be, and like newark said that's all about the money.

That's what I loved about Mitt. He made his money in venture capitalism and didn't need a dime from special interests. He couldn't be bought, and I believe that's why the establishment was so against him from the beginning.

What we can do about this is continue to root out cronyism whenever it's discovered. We can't get the money off the airwaves. As long as mass communication exists, it will be utilized by those with power and money. And mass communication serves our needs as well in a society so mobile that most people no longer live near their parents and grandparents.

We can't scrap the whole apparatus, but we can pull out the faulty gears and put shiny new ones in.

The other thing we can do is get involved. The more informed voters we have, the fewer low-information voters we'll have. Nice little inverse relationship there. Spread the word!

The public airwaves(a.k.a. "electromagnetic spectrum", "radio spectrum", or "spectrum")is the modern-day version of the public square/town square.

BY LAW, the public airwaves belong to the American people, NOT to private media corporations.

The public airwaves are not private property. They are public property.

They are a scarce national resource, a national treasure that is worth, according to most estimates, between $500 billion and $1 trillion.

The public airwaves are LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE by our federal government to private media corporations.

In exchange for this trillion-dollar government gift, private media corporations have a legal obligation to "serve the public interest."

It is up to the Federal Communications Commission(FCC) to decide what does and what doesn't serve the public interest, and to allocate scarce broadcasting licenses accordingly.

Over the years, the FCC has demonstrated an unequivocal and unmistakable preference for news broadcasters with a severely liberal world view and bias, in clear violation of the First Amendment principle of freedom of speech/freedom of the press and the Fourteenth Amendment principle of equal protection under the law.

The problem is not mass communications. The problem is the expropriation, the commandeering, the hijacking of America's mass communications infrastructure by liberal propagandists in the media, aided and abetted by their political cronies at the FCC.